ST. LOUIS, Mo (Nov. 5, 2025) — Mercy is helping lead a nationwide effort to transform nursing care through technology, announcing Tuesday its collaboration with Microsoft to develop the first commercially available ambient AI solution for nurses within Microsoft Dragon Copilot.

The new tool, already in use at Mercy hospitals in St. Louis and Springfield, Missouri, and Fort Smith, Arkansas, uses ambient artificial intelligence to document nursing observations during patient interactions with patient consent and automatically integrates them into the electronic health record.

Mercy is one of eight U.S. health systems working closely with Microsoft and frontline nurses to shape the technology. Medical-surgical nurses at Mercy helped develop and refine the system by narrating care in real time.

“Nurses face growing challenges every day, including staffing shortages, heavy documentation demands and constant multitasking,” said Cheryl Denison, clinical integration director with Mercy’s Office of Transformation. “By enabling nurses to document care more naturally through speech, ambient voice technology reduces cognitive load while also enabling them to do more of what they became a nurse to do in the first place, care for patients.”

With the World Health Organization projecting a global shortage of 4.5 million nurses by 2030, Mercy and Microsoft hope the technology will help reduce burnout and improve job satisfaction. Surveys show that nurses spend more than a quarter of their shift on documentation and administrative tasks.

According to Mercy, Dragon Copilot helps address those issues by:

• Streamlining documentation, allowing nurses to narrate care that’s automatically transcribed into records.
• Improving access to clinical insights directly within workflows.
• Automating tasks like drafting notes and summarizing patient interactions.

Early results from Mercy show a 21% reduction in documentation latency, a 29% drop in overtime, and a 4.5% increase in patient satisfaction.

“Many of our nurses have said that by narrating as they provide care, which is pulled into the electronic medical record, they’re noticing their documentation is much more robust,” said Stephanie Whitaker, chief nursing officer at Mercy Hospital Fort Smith. “We cannot wait to roll it out across all of Mercy.”

Umesh Rustogi, general manager of Dragon and Platform, Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft, said the collaboration relied heavily on feedback from Mercy’s frontline nurses. “The real-time feedback from both the frontline nurses as well as the nursing informatics team at Mercy was really valuable in shaping this technology around real-world needs,” he said.

Mercy, one of the nation’s 15 largest health systems, operates 55 hospitals and more than 1,000 outpatient and physician practice locations across Arkansas, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma. The health system employs over 50,000 caregivers and provided more than $500 million in free care and community benefits in fiscal year 2025.

Paul Barnard Editor

Paul Barnard is the editor of the Twin City News. Barnard Graduated from Norwich University, America's oldest private military college, with a B.S. in Communications and Media Technology. There he studied journalism and marketing. For years after, Barnard was in law enforcement and gained experience in the Special Investigations Unit and publishing all the department's press releases. As Barnard's family grew, he moved on to start Twin City News.

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